The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  Security blues flashed down the street over the thick lanes of traffic, and through the layers of street signs above me I spotted a couple of security vehicles as they floated past. One of them shined a cone of light down onto the sidewalk as it went, sweeping it around as it turned between two buildings. Eyebot called it out, highlighting the ship in white outline, then noting the license plate ID, make, and GPS coordinates.

  Do they already know I’m still alive? Are they looking for me?

  I had to go. I spotted a gate hub across the lanes of traffic about two blocks ahead and made my way over to it. At the queue, I split off from the flow of foot traffic and headed for the rightmost gate, the one leading to the haan settlement of Shangzho. Unlike at the others, there was no crowd waiting to go through and the scanner flickered out of sleep mode when I approached the thin metal frame. On the other side I could make out a long, reinforced brick wall topped with rings of razor wire. Over the wall, low in the night sky, star Fangwenzhe glowed like a second, smaller moon.

  In spite of his anxiety, Tānchi had fallen back into his food-induced sleep, warm and limp inside the blankets. I held him to my chest as I strode up to the gate, whispering into his ear.

  “One ... two ...”

  A strange feeling of limbo gripped me when I stepped through the portal, and then a beat later space and gravity returned as my foot came down on a sidewalk across town.

  “...three!”

  A klaxon made me jump as a red light flashed from behind. I turned around and saw a holographic panel flicker on, a grainy translucent display with instructions in six different languages. It wanted me to pay the balance for the trip. Back toward the wall, heads were beginning to turn as I swiped my cash card and headed toward the settlement entrance.

  Razor wire sat spiraled along the pitted, spray-painted wall that separated the fourth colony from the rest of Hangfei, until it reached a guard station where two armed human soldiers stood. There were others there, people lined up in loose groups eyeing the wall sullenly from a makeshift camp of bedrolls and sleeping bags scattered on the pavement just outside the security zone. Faces watched me as I approached, lit by the steady glow of an electric lantern. I could make out their handmade signs that were propped up halfheartedly, with slogans like THEY EAT: WE STARVE and 0%, a reference to the food index. One old man with a scraggly beard and hollow cheeks held one that just said SIPS. Starving In Plain Sight.

  A short distance away from the protesters, a group of Fangwenzhe worshipper gonzos had set up shop. There were five of them, three men and two women, all on their knees with their eyes closed and hands clasped, facing the brick wall. A shrine had been set up there next to a poster of their leader, Gohan Sòng, the tips of incense sticks glowing cherry red in the breeze and a cheap plastic apple spinning in midair a few inches above them. Behind it, someone had spray-painted their catchphrase in colorful hanzi: ONLY HE CAN MOVE THE STARS.

  All of their eyes followed me as I broke through the line and approached the guard station. The eyebot app painted the two guards when I got closer, and I saw some data go scribbling across the bottom of the 3i’s pink window as it identified their faces. One of the guards, a tall guy with bronze skin and oily hair, looked up as I fumbled for my ID. His name was Gang Sun. I cradled the kid in one arm and held the badge where he could see.

  “What’s this?” Sun asked. The other guard, a broad-shouldered guy with a buzz cut who eyebot identified as Shen Liao, chuckled to himself.

  “I need to get inside please.”

  “Does this look like the mall? Go home.”

  “Visitors are allowed inside.”

  “During specified hours,” he said, “with a written permit. They’re locked down for tonight anyway. There’s a security sweep about to start, in case you hadn’t heard. Go home, and come back in the morning with a permit.”

  I fished out Dragan’s spare badge I’d found in the safe and showed it to them. “My guardian is military. We’re part of the surrogate program,” I told them.

  His eyes glanced from the badge, down at the kid. “Then take it to Shiliuyuán.”

  “I’ll never get there and back before curfew. It’s an emergency.” He frowned. “Look, my ration kit got stolen, no thanks to you guys, and he can’t go a whole night without—”

  “You really Dragan’s kid?” Liao chimed in. His partner shot him a dark look.

  “You know him?”

  “Where is he during all this?”

  “On assignment. I’m alone and I need help.” Liao frowned again, like he thought he might be making a mistake, but he sighed.

  “Let’s see your papers.”

  Sun rolled his eyes. “For shit’s sake ...,” he muttered, but Liao waved him down.

  “I don’t have them on me,” I said. “Look, I can’t take care of the kid anymore. Shangzho has a surrogate center, right? I’ll just drop him off there.”

  “You need your papers at least,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Okay,” I said. I bluffed, holding Tānchi out toward him. “I’ll just leave him here with you while I go back—”

  “No, no, no,” he said, holding up his hands like I’d just handed him a dirty diaper.

  “Then can you take him in?”

  “We can’t leave our posts. It’s a security lockdown.”

  I waited, holding the kid while they glanced at each other and Sun shook his head. After a minute, though, Liao sighed again.

  “You’re killing me, kid.”

  He reached through the guard station window and scribbled something on a little pad of tickets. He thumped his palm down on the flat red button next to the pad, and the main gate opened a few feet, trailing what looked like a length of toilet paper in the breeze.

  “Here’s a temporary pass,” he said, holding the ticket out along with my ID. “Go to the center, drop it off, then come right back.”

  “Thanks.”

  He blocked me with one arm when I tried to pass. “Backpack stays here.”

  “But I—”

  “No buts.”

  I didn’t want to leave it with them, but I didn’t have much of a choice, it looked like. I dropped it just inside the guard station doorway, and he lowered his arm.

  “Thank Dragan next time you see him. You got thirty minutes, but leave time to get home before curfew.”

  “What happens after thirty minutes?”

  “Then your temporary pass expires,” Sun said. “You’re officially in violation of border security.”

  “Then what?”

  “They eat you, I think.”

  I snatched the ID and ticket back and slipped through before they changed their minds. The two chuckled, and one of the protesters yelled something unintelligible after me in a hoarse voice.

  Racist assholes.

  The gate clanged shut, leaving me alone inside.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Three

  29:07:22 BC

  I’d seen three of the settlements from the outside, small chunks of the city given to the haan when they began to outgrow the ship, but I’d never actually been inside any of them. The other ten were outside Tùzi-wō, but Shangzho, while not the first, had over time become the largest and the most well known in Hangfei.

  People come here all the time, I told myself. It’s no big deal.

  They came during the day, though. As I made my way across the empty, stone-paved plaza, the whole place looked and felt abandoned. Part of it was the darkness— haan almost never used visible light, so the only real light to see by came from whatever bled over from the surrounding city, the moon, and the pale glow of Fangwenzhe. Shangzho sat like a dark hole in a sparkling sea, but at ground level it was downright eerie.

  Up ahead I could make out the ornate entryway of what used to be a school, with a deserted playground carved out in front of it where the occasional scalefly flitted from shadow to shadow. A lopsided carousel and a rusting swing set cast shadows across the stones, and when I looked c
loser I could make out the names of children etched on their surfaces. A tourist sign hung from a metal arch in front of the whole thing, where calligraphy characters spelled out Peace Bricks.

  It marked the spot where, back before I was even born, the first haan to die on Earth lost his life. Five construction workers beat him with lengths of rebar while he’d clung to those carousel bars, and onlookers cheered. They shattered his bones like glass until his corpse disappeared, gated back to the ship. He never even lifted a finger to fight back. Maybe he couldn’t. He might have been unconscious after the first couple of blows. At least, I hoped he had been.

  The names on the peace bricks, put there by the schoolkids who had sat by helplessly, were old and worn now. My footsteps echoed softly as I crossed over them, the only sound except for the street noises back on the other side of the wall. Particles of grit rose lazily from up from between the pavers here and there, floating up through the ambient light like rain in reverse as a graviton eddy coursed through.

  “Look,” I whispered to Tānchi. “Look where we are.” His eyes were fully lit now, looking curiously into the darkness up ahead. I heard a low note twang overhead and looked up to see a little haan construct, its purpose unknown, creep along a taut power fine. Tānchi’s gaze followed it until it disappeared down an alleyway.

  The buildings that loomed around the square were human built, but without any trace of smog stain or biocide residue anywhere. No trash littered the ground, and no graffiti marked the walls. Every window had been glossed over black, and some kind of smooth honeycomb scales covered just about every vertical surface. Above, through the framework of unlit signs and currents of swarming scaleflies, I could make out irregular clusters of shadows that hung from the building faces like big urban barnacles.

  I couldn’t see any haan, but they were there. A haze of signal bled through the mite cluster constantly, pooling in the back of my mind. There were too many to pinpoint any one specific feeling or intention, just a constant tide of brain stew that was as palpable as the summer heat.

  I pulled up the Shangzho map on my phone and pushed it around with my fingertip until I found the surrogate center. I plotted a route and then hopped onto the glassy surface of a moving walkway. Once I had my footing, it picked up speed, and the building faces on either side of the street began to streak past as it carried me into the darkness.

  As a humid breeze coursed over me, I sat down on the conveyor and held Tānchi to my chest while empty outdoor cafés, bars, and shop fronts flowed past us. I cracked my neck and let out a deep breath, then watched myself in a street-length window as we sailed past. The scratches that crisscrossed my skin looked black, and I could make out pale skin peeking through holes in my shirt. A mixture of half scabs and wet blood covered my face and neck like war paint. I followed it with my eyes, staring back at myself as the belt turned away, and caught a flicker of red light from somewhere up above, behind me.

  I turned around and looked up to see a pair of flame red eyes staring down from the face of the building across the street. They were coming from one of the barnacle shadows that hung there. As I watched, several more pairs of eyes lit up around it, and in the resulting glow I saw that the shapes were actually haan. They were sitting on the layer of hexagonal scales as if they’d been glued there, staring down at me.

  Graviton plating. They sat in groups, some twenty stories above. More and more of the eyes were lighting up, a mixture of reds, oranges, and yellows. There were hundreds of them up there, all watching me.

  The first call came in on my 3i then, and the display popped up of its own accord as one of them pried open a channel. Before I knew it, dozens of them had begun to hammer the connection, and the junk call buffer overflowed. I cricked my neck to stow the 3i window, but it just popped up again.

  “Enough, guys,” I said, but my voice sounded a little unsure. Several shadows moved along the walls of the buildings to either side, and I heard footsteps from the darkness of the side streets there. A few seconds later an empathic spike shot through the mite cluster, and I felt a pang of hunger. The intensity of it made my stomach clench, and it grew as the eyes followed me down the walkway. All the while, a mass of invisible feelers probed the 3i for a crack they could sneak into.

  “Enough!” I shouted.

  The hunger signals grew stronger as my phone buzzed in my pocket. One of them had given up on the 3i and found the cell connection. I dug it out and my hands shook as I switched it off. I told myself I would be okay, but as a wave of firelit eyes surged in my direction, I felt fear prick in my chest.

  What happens then?

  They eat you…

  I stood up and began to take long strides down the walkway in spite of the pain in my leg. One at a time the haan weren’t exactly intimidating, but when the streets and building faces all began to crawl with movement, my fear edged toward panic. The kid picked up on it and squirmed in my arms.

  Wait.

  The word appeared in the 3i window in front of me as one of them somehow managed to sneak its way in. More of them had started to worm their way through, and unlike the kid’s curious probes, these were pushy and insistent.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. I shut the 3i down but couldn’t do anything about the mite cluster. The hollow ache in the pit of my stomach had turned my legs weak.

  They’re hungrier than we are, I thought. They take so much... eighty percent of all consumable calories from the combined feedlots ... how can they still be so hungry?

  The surrogate center loomed up ahead and I picked up the pace. When I got closer to it, I noticed that the eyes around me began to thin out until, by the time the pinprick scanners at the gate flashed black-light blue, they were gone.

  I hopped off the walkway. The front entrance, a thick glass partition so clear and clean I hadn’t even realized it was there, slid silently on its track to let me through. I glanced back once and saw the smattering of staring eyes in the distance wink out one by one.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered in Tānchi’s ear, hugging him to my chest. I felt him relax a little as he held me back.

  Inside the building a long, empty corridor stretched off into darkness where there were no signs in any language. Not sure where to go, I started down, the squeak of my damp rubber soles echoing ahead and behind. The air turned cooler, and I’d passed several closed doors on either side when something flickered in the dark up ahead. Electronic black-lit eyes stared down at me, and a knobby metal ball dropped down on a mechanical stalk that trailed a web of hair-thin wires. The array of electronic sensors focused on me, and the ball emitted something between a chirp and an electronic fart, but my attention had turned to the shadows beyond it.

  Whoa.

  Past the eye, the walls had been stripped down to their I-beams. The tiled floor had been peeled away to form a yawning, circular hole underneath the steel framework.

  What the hell is that?

  The hole dropped down into blackness, ringed by what looked like giant spines or bristles. A low rush of air rumbled from its mouth, and the kid clucked happily, pawing at the air toward it as the shape inside his head shuddered.

  I had stepped past the eye to get a better look when I felt a hitch and the view in front of me changed. I’d passed headlong through an unseen gate and stumbled into a dark, low-ceilinged room somewhere else. I heard scurrying overhead and looked up as a series of soft white lights flickered on to let me see. Tiny little servos, biogel blobs with wiry mechanical legs, streamed across ordered clusters of wire above me.

  With a jolt, I spun around but saw only a honeycomb-scaled wall behind me. I turned around again and found myself facing a semicircular guard station on the other side of the room, where a uniformed male haan stood.

  His wide-set eyes glowed brilliant orange, his skin glistening in the low light. Through the forehead of his handsome mannequin-like face, I could make out the grublike curls of his two brains, and the clusters of cilia that tethered them to other half-seen
nodules in there with them. The little brain began to quiver, and when I glanced down at Tānchi I saw the smaller shape inside his head stir in response.

  “Excuse me,” I said, breaking the silence. One of the haan’s eyes turned to me, the pupils making a quick revolution. His suit draped from his broad shoulders, folded around him like leathery wings as he stared.

  “I need to—”

  “Wait,” the haan said, the voice box at his throat flickering as the smooth, synthesized voice issued from it. A scalefly buzzed out from the folds of his suit.